Less information, more whitespace = better recall
Steve Safran March 14th, 2007
The less you try and cram into a story and a website, the more people will remember. That’s one of the lessons from Jakob Nielsen and OJR’s latest eyetracking testing. They took a story and edited it down. People spent half the time engaged in the edited version than they did in the unedited version, yet they remembered 34% more details. Give your audience the essentials, give a clean presentation and they will remember the information. Time to clear out the clutter from your sites. (Via Valleywag, RSS)
Cory adds: This is required reading for anyone who works in TV. Most TV sites are still terribly cluttered in large part because TV people are foisting their agendas on the web. So web producers, send this to your offending TV managers and start simplifying.
2 Comments Add your own
1. Don Day | March 14th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Does anyone know if Poynter is involved - and will they be doing something along the lines of the EyeTrack III site?
poynterextra-dot-org/eyetrack2004
2. Robin | March 15th, 2007 at 12:09 am
I feel like this is generally right, BUT, I have to admit I was slightly suspicious given that the findings basically conform exactly to Nielsen’s strongly-held beliefs about web design.
I mean, sure, maybe he’s just right. About everything. But it would have been reassuring to see at least one finding that was surprising, or that ran counter to conventional Nielsen wisdom.
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